


Love Leaves a Memory

by solrosan



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Discussion of Death, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Miranda Barlow Appreciation, Miranda Barlow Deserved Better, Multi, Past Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 04, Savannah - Freeform, reconnecting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-08
Updated: 2020-01-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:27:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,560
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22177042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solrosan/pseuds/solrosan
Summary: James' first night at the plantation, Thomas asks about Miranda. It takes months for James to tell him everything.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton, Miranda Barlow/Captain Flint | James McGraw/Thomas Hamilton
Comments: 18
Kudos: 77





	Love Leaves a Memory

**Author's Note:**

> It's always scary to write for a new fandom, but here we go! Late to the party I finished Black Sails a few days ago and this is one of the two fics I desperately needed to write to process all of it. The second will probably not be written any time soon, but this fic had to come out.
> 
> It's not betaed, just written, and the title is from the quote _Death leaves a heartache no one can heal, Love leaves a memory no one can steal._
> 
> I hope you enjoy the fic!
> 
> * * *

They sit on the step to the shed where the tools are kept, James sits one step higher than Thomas. They have one hour until count Thomas has explained, one hour between the end of the work day and when their dinner is served and they have to be inside. One hour per day when they are almost free men. 

And during chapel each Sunday. 

It’s not like they are slaves. They are just… unfree workers.

“Slaves,” says James, a weak smile on his lips. He’s been wearing a smile almost since he first saw Thomas, since it really sunk in that Silver hadn’t tricked him. He isn’t completely convinced about that yet, truth be told, but at least Silver hadn’t lied about Thomas and James doesn’t seem able to stop smiling.

Thomas smiles too. “I take ‘slave’ over ‘prisoner’ or ‘dead’ any day.”

James thinks of Madi. He wonders if she'd agree with that and what she said to Silver when he told her that he had sold him to work at a plantation. He thinks of her mother, of Mr. Scott. He feels pretty certain they wouldn’t agree with Thomas on this. He thinks of Julius and knows for a fact he doesn’t agree, though he’s also fairly sure the man would think this a fun turn of events.

James reaches out his hand to touch Thomas’ hair. He’s been doing that all day, they both have, just reaching out now and then to make absolutely sure the other is real. Thomas leans into the touch. 

“Where’s Miranda?” Thomas suddenly asks.

James sighs and pulls his hand back. He leans forward, folds his hands. He can’t look at Thomas. He had known this would come, from the moment he had allowed himself to hope that maybe Silver wasn’t playing the world’s cruellest trick on him he had dreaded this conversation. He just hadn’t thought it’d come this fast.

He looks out over the field where they worked side by side this afternoon, squinting against the setting sun. He doesn’t want to do this, not tonight. Tonight he just wants to be here with Thomas. He wants to sit on this step and watch the sun set with Thomas, just as he had done so many evenings on the porch in Nassau with Miranda. 

Thomas’ ghost had always been there on the porch, though, so perhaps Miranda’s should be here with them now.

“What happened to her, James?” asks Thomas when his silence grows too long. 

The slight change of words doesn’t pass James by. Apparently the silence had been the answer he couldn’t give him. He keeps looking at the horizon, wondering if the hour isn’t up soon. 

“If I tell you the short version,” he starts, “can we save the long one for another day?”

From the corner of his eyes he sees Thomas nod. He takes a deep breath.

“Peter Ashe killed her.”

Thomas leans away from him, staring. 

“Peter?” he says in disbelief. 

James nods. “Or one of his, one of his men.”

“But-- but why? Peter? Ashe? Peter Ashe?”

“Yes,” says James, taking another deep breath through his nose. “And I killed him for it.”

“You--”

James nods again. He looks down at his hands, wishing, praying that the bell will ring and they’ll have to go inside.

“James, what--”

James stands up abruptly. “Not tonight. Not… tonight.”

“James…”

“Not tonight.”

Thomas gets to his feet. With his hand he forces James to lift his chin and meet his eyes. 

“I’ll tell you everything, I promise, but--”

“--not tonight,” Thomas finishes the sentence for him. Thomas takes a step closer and wraps his arms around him. “Not tonight.”

* * *

The rest of the story comes in bits and pieces.

Thomas doesn’t ask about Miranda again, actually he doesn’t ask anything at all. Neither does James. Yet bit by bit, they get to know the other’s way to this place. Sometimes their stories overlap, like when Thomas says that his father is dead and James grimly answers that he knows. Sometimes they can’t be further apart, like when James talks about the open sea with a smile on his face and a spark in his eyes and Thomas thinks about the four walls of the tiny cell he was locked inside of.

Then comes the night when Thomas mentions Peter Ashe again. They sit in James’ small room, James on the chair, Thomas on the bed. The door open. Thomas is very careful when he says the name and tells that it was Peter who had arranged for his passage over the Atlantic. 

“It was guilt, Thomas,” James interrupts. “He did it out of guilt. He sold us out and his 30 pieces of silver was Carolina. And a grandfather clock.” 

Whatever Thomas had been trying to say, the story told that night becomes a different one. When it’s done, when James breathes out “...and I left her there.” Thomas is on his knees in front of the chair, James’ forehead resting against his shoulder.

However neither of them can find real comfort in the other that night.

* * *

They don’t have to work in the field when it rains. The idea is that they should work inside those days, but in reality there isn’t enough to fill more than a few hours per rainy day with. Instead they get most of the rainy days off. James starts to think that maybe Thomas is right after all, they aren’t slaves. They are just not free. 

Yet he can’t remember ever having _felt_ this free. There are other men like them here, which probably is a reason. Thomas is here, which definitely is a reason. He doesn’t think it’s all of it, but he doesn’t dwell on the whys and hows, afraid that if he does he’ll see the chains and shatter the peace he feels. It’s been four months. He doesn’t expect it to last forever, but he’ll be damned if he does anything to ruin it himself.

The window to Thomas’ room is open. The rain is a soothing background noise. James sits on Thomas’ bed, reading Middleton aloud. Thomas has his head in his lap, holding his free hand with both of his. It makes it close to impossible to turn the pages, but James isn’t overly bothered by it. 

“Was she happy?” asks Thomas when James pauses to take a breath. When James moves the book so he can look down at him, he tries to clarify, “In Nassau, was she happy?”

James frowns. He puts the book away, open and face down next to them on the bed. Thomas waits for him, they haven’t mentioned Miranda since the evening they talked about Ashe and the events of Charles Town. 

“I don’t think we were truly happy a single day after they took you from us,” James says after a long pause, “but I don’t think she was unhappy, either. A lot of the time -- perhaps most of the time -- we were only existing.”

Thomas smiles. A sad smile. A pained smile.

James touches his hair, twins the short locks between his fingers. Plucks at it as if he’s removing something only he can see. 

“She kept a garden,” he says.

“What?” Thomas lets out a laugh. “Miranda? Our Miranda?”

“A vegetable garden. It took her three years to get an entire meal from it.”

A smile touches his lips at the memory. She had been so proud that day, held herself in a way he hadn’t seen since London. As far as he can remember, it tasted fine, but all meals with Miranda had been to prefer over the ones on the ship. Even the ones when they ate in silence, even the ones when she had been cross with him. Or perhaps not those.

Or maybe those too.

“I can’t picture her cooking,” says Thomas. “Sometimes I can’t picture her at all anymore... I remember things like her blue dress. And her necklace, the one with the red stone.”

“The one that made it impossible to not look at her bosom?”

“She had me for a husband, she had to do something,” he says with a smile. It slowly fades and he adds ruefully, “Did she bring any of them? Did she wear them?”

“We sold most of them,” James says. “The ones we didn’t, she never wore. At least not when I was around. I think they reminded her too much of you and the life I had forced her to leave.”

Thomas looks up at his eyes. Very seriously he says, “You kept looking at her breast though, right?”

James laughs. “Occasionally, yes.”

“Good.”

James’ hand has stilled on Thomas’ head. He keeps it there because he can. He smiles, because it’s really hard not to. Even when talking about Miranda. They had never been able to talk about Thomas, he and Miranda. The bitterness, the guilt and the grief had been too strong, at least for him, and slowly the memory of the man they both loved had faded and turned into his demons.

It won’t happen to Miranda. He can’t let it. She deserves more than to be forgotten and become a ghost. He has already told Thomas how she died, so now, as the rain pours down over Savannah, he starts to tell him how she lived.


End file.
